Monday, August 16, 2010

Desktop notification support in gPodder

Three days ago, Maemo bug 11130 was filed: It complains about gPodder stealing focus when it has finished checking for new episodes in the background. This is true, and I've been bitten by this annoyance several times already, so I decided to finally have a look into the SMS/IM/Phone-style notifications (the "yellow" bubble that merges into your task switcher after some time). Thankfully, Daniel Would (of Witter fame) has published his research results some months ago already, so getting up and running was easy from that point. Here are the results so far:

One problem that I still have not figured out how to fix (even after digging in the hildon-home source tree) is how to attach such a notification to the a given window (or application) instead of having it appear as separate "window" in the task switcher (see the second screenshot). Can somebody in the know give me a hint? On the other hand, the callback for clicking on the notification works fine already and opens the new episodes dialog.

A related change that also prevents gPodder from stealing focus was to replace the progress indicator dialog with a HildonBanner - it might not look so good without a progress bar, but it makes gPodder less intrusive when the user interacts with other applications.